Three Days After the Midterm Rout, Trump Pushed Out Chief of Staff Susie Wiles — Reportedly Blaming Her for the Party's Losses in Front of Others — and Handed the Most Powerful Staff Job in the White House to Stephen Miller, the Hardline Architect of the Administration's Most Extreme Policies; Rather Than Course-Correct After a Historic Rebuke, Trump Scapegoated His Aide and Doubled Down on His Most Divisive Adviser
On November 6, 2026 — three days after voters flipped both chambers of Congress against him — Trump announced that Susie Wiles was out as White House chief of staff and would be replaced, effective November 9, by Stephen Miller, until then the deputy chief of staff for policy and the homeland-security adviser, and the figure most associated with the administration's hardest-line immigration and executive-power policies. Accounts of the exit differ: Axios reported Wiles submitted her resignation; others, citing CNN, said she resigned after watching Trump lose confidence in her; the Washington Post flatly described Trump as having removed her. The New York Times reported that Trump had blamed Wiles for the party's midterm losses in front of other people. Whichever framing is right, the through-line is the same, and it is a failure of character and of judgment rolled into one. Handed a historic repudiation at the ballot box, a leader capable of self-correction asks what he got wrong. Trump instead faulted his chief of staff — the latest in a series of women pushed out of top roles in his administration — and elevated, to the single most powerful position in the building, the adviser most responsible for the very agenda the voters had just rejected. It was the opposite of a course correction. It was a doubling-down, with a scapegoat.